Unanimous (3)
I washed my hands with relentless dedication. With particular focus on the ring finger of my left hand.
I cupped the handwash-lathered finger in my right palm and scrubbed it the way a middle schooler might chafe his half-grown little cock — over and over, as if the motion itself could scrub away the past.
Until the wedding ring mark disappeared… I kept at it for a good two or three minutes.
When I glanced back, another man was staring at me like I'd lost my mind. Only then did I become conscious of how this bizarre performance of mine must have looked to everyone else.
Even on a weekday, the first-floor restroom of the department store was packed with people relieving themselves, yet there were only two sinks in the whole place.
While I had monopolized one sink, waging my desperate war against a ring mark, no fewer than five people had already washed their hands at the other one and left.
Only once that fact registered did I finally rinse off the foam, dry my hands, and walk out.
I checked my phone: 6:55 p.m. Five minutes until our seven o'clock meeting. Thankfully, more than enough time to make it to the movie theater on the fifth floor of the same building.
There was no reason to be in any hurry, and yet my heart went thumping away at double speed for no good reason.
It was a distinctly different thrill from the one I'd felt that night, long ago, calling my wife on the way home after sleeping with Hye-jeong for the first time.
That's right. This was unmistakably butterflies.
And that was a good sign, too. I had a premonition that I'd come away with more than enough inspiration to write the next chapter of Human Guilty.
Just as she'd told me, she was sitting bolt upright on a standing chair placed in front of the popcorn stand. Honestly, the woman had no idea how to be anything but earnest.
I quickened my pace and greeted her.
"Hi there! Sorry, have you been waiting long?"
"H-hello! Guilty…?"
She returned the greeting carefully, and in that brief moment I scanned her from head to toe.
Fair, luminous skin and gentle, doe-like eyes. A straight nose bridge that lent her an odd, understated elegance. An oval face that somehow made even an in-between-length bob look good. She seemed a touch shorter than Chae-rin… so maybe around 162 centimeters?
Anyway, the overall impression was one of quiet composure. The muted, oversized blouse and dress slacks she wore only deepened that calm, collected air.
"That's me. Funny — meeting you in person like this, I can't help slipping into polite speech. Haha…"
When I answered with that awkward formality, she looked up at me with wide, round eyes. She looked exactly like a baby rabbit. It was adorable.
"Just talk casually with me!"
Even the way she strained to put a bright lilt into her naturally calm voice was cute. I gave her a warm, crinkling smile.
"Okay."
Now that we'd finally met face-to-face, we could hardly keep calling each other by our Tender handles. So we exchanged proper introductions.
Just as I'd guessed, her real name was Ha-young.
Yu Ha-young. Born in 2000. From what I'd already learned on Tender, she worked at a design agency.
A Daegu girl by birth, she'd moved up to Seoul for university six years ago.
In turn, I gave her my real name and age straight away.
Han Yu-jae. Born in 1995. As I'd already told her on Tender: a former developer at a software company, now a full-time writer serializing web novels after quitting.
What I never told Ha-young, of course — what I couldn't tell her — was that this Han Yu-jae was, in fact, a married man.
Our movie was scheduled for 7:10 p.m. Factoring in the pre-show ads, we spent a leisurely ten minutes or so chatting right there before heading in.
It was a genuinely delightful, heart-fluttering conversation. Mostly it consisted of the two of us trading thinly veiled compliments about how the other looked in person.
Amora, a film about a female stripper in New York, was — truly — scorching from the very first scene.
Neither of us had expected it to open with a naked woman performing a strip show, so all we could do was stare at each other in flustered embarrassment, exchanging awkward little laughs.
And that helpless, bumbling atmosphere, ironically, peeled away layer by layer the wariness that inevitably lingers between two people who met through an app called Tender.
Every time another sex scene unfolded after that, we'd glance at each other and share the same sheepish grin.
Which meant we had arrived, silently and together, at the same understanding: that sex wasn't something taboo, but something that made you laugh. In other words, we had both tacitly admitted that sex was, above all, fun.
Maybe that's why. We did the deed on the very first day. God knows I'd hoped it wouldn't happen like that.
In the not-so-distant past, I'd slept with Manager Hye-jeong on the first day, and with my wife Chae-rin on the first day too.
This time, I hadn't wanted to sprint down that same fast track. What I wanted, more than anything, was to savor that ticklish, tingling feeling a little longer.
That was exactly why Ha-young's unassuming Tender profile had caught my eye in the first place.
And yet — why did I do it?
When she said, "I have a mini projector at my place," why on earth did I blurt out, "Oh, watching a movie on that together sounds fun"?
And why, on top of that, did I go and ask, "Want to watch Eternal Sunshine together tonight, then?"
What I craved had, somewhere along the line, changed completely — from the tingling sweetness of early-stage dating straight to sex.
Amora was, without question, a masterpiece worthy of the Golden Bear at Cannes.
It wasn't a film wallowing in prostitution and sex for their own sake. By illuminating the life of a sex worker, it laid bare America's every social ill — an art film with something genuine to say.
And yet that masterpiece left the two of us with nothing but the single realization that 'sex is fun.'
The countless love scenes in Amora were unmistakably steeped in sorrow, loneliness, and futility — but the two of us had come away with entirely different feelings.
Perhaps a shared desire had bloomed in us both: the urge to sublimate those feelings, as quickly as possible, by entwining our bodies.
We hurried to her one-room apartment. Under the pretext, of course, of cozily watching Eternal Sunshine on her projector together.
That's how impatient we both were — we'd swiftly reached the joint conclusion that dinner, too, could just as well be taken care of at her place.
And before we'd even managed that dinner, before the projector had even started playing Eternal Sunshine, we were already kissing.
We hadn't even extended the most basic courtesy to the pretexts we'd left standing.
She clearly hadn't expected things to move this fast on day one either. Her apartment was fairly messy, and the underwear she'd been wearing was a mismatched set, top and bottom.
Though however messy it was, it still couldn't hold a candle to Manager Hye-jeong's pigsty.
Right after our kiss, she put on a visibly startled expression.
"Whoa, how are you doing this on the first day? So this is what being in your thirties is like?"
There was no wariness in her eyes as she said it. If anything, they brimmed with pure desire — a hunger to taste the seasoned technique of a man in his thirties.
The way she suddenly tacked polite endings onto her sentences mid-casual-speech seemed, too, to be some unconscious instinct to size me up.
Then a thought struck me. Was it all a mask?
Her Tender profile that said she was looking for something serious. The careful, guarded way she'd spoken the whole time. The modest, unrevealing outfit she'd chosen for our first date.
Hadn't her reason for joining Tender been impure from the very start?
Ha-young gazed at me with that signature meek, lamb-like look of hers and said, shyly:
"I've… never done this before."
Oh, come on. She can't mean sex itself. She means this situation — sleeping with someone on the very first day of meeting them.
But either way, it turned me on all the same. I mean, isn't the word 'first time' inherently, tremendously erotic?
It was clearly not a confession of fear or trembling nerves, or of wanting to push this away because she hated it.
After all, as I unzipped her dress slacks, slipped my hand inside her panties, and stroked her already soaked pussy, she didn't resist even once.
"Aaah♡"
After about five minutes of foreplay like that, I moved to start the main event… and then — damn it. No condoms.
While I floundered around uselessly, rock-hard with nowhere to put it, Ha-young watched me in silence for a moment, then spoke quietly.
"It's okay. You don't have to put it in."
The instant she said it, Chae-rin flashed through my mind. The cursed condom from that batch that tore — and just like that, a pregnancy, and a wife…
I snapped back to my senses and fumbled my pants back up.
"Still too risky. I'll run to the convenience store."
Just as I said it and moved to leave, Ha-young pulled her clothes back on to follow me.
"I'm coming too."
At the same moment, her pale, bare stomach chimed in with a comment of its own.
[Grrrrroooowwl—]
At the convenience store nearby, we bought condoms — and a cup of instant ramen each.
Sitting side by side at the little indoor table, shoveling down palm-oil-soaked noodles with disposable wooden chopsticks.
And so our very first meal together turned out to be about as far from romantic as a meal could get.
The moment we finished eating, we rushed back to her place, too impatient to finish what we'd started.
Her breasts were a B-cup bordering on C, and the shape of those perky, all-natural mounds was beautiful to the point of being almost unnatural. The pink areolae that suited her fair skin, the perfectly sized nipples — every bit of it delighted my eyes.
As if in gratitude, I put on a display of thirties-era sexual mastery.
I varied my thrusting rhythm to keep her deliciously on edge, and using every muscle in a body trained by nothing but sex, I lifted her clean off the bed and fucked her while holding her up.
Thankfully, even through all that dynamic acrobatics, the domestic condom from the convenience store held together without tearing.
It had been a day where nothing — not one single thing — had gone according to expectation. And the sheer volume of inspiration that gushed out of it soared far past all expectation, too.
Only then did I truly understand the appeal of dating apps.
When Ha-young suggested I stay the night, I told her my mother was waiting for me at home. Thankfully, she didn't give my excessive filial piety any grief.
Having made a promise to see Ha-young again, I left her place — and belatedly called not my mother, but my wife.
"Hey, honey. The conversation ran long, so that's why I'm calling so late. Sorry."
"Min-hyuk, seriously, just get divorced already. Why do you keep fighting with your wife and making this such a hassle for everyone."
Chae-rin was fuming. On the way home, I stopped by a convenience store and soothed her with promises of the chocolate she loved.
After the call ended, I opened the Tender app again.
Ha-young had left me a short, simple message: 'Get home safe! I had fun today!'
Before replying to it, I browsed through the new Like♡ senders first. One of them had a Japanese username that caught my eye.
'CatLover (24)'. In her photos she wore hime-cut hair and heavy makeup. I boldly sent her a Like♡ and matched.
Yu Ha-young, who'd played the demure innocent on the surface while secretly thirsting for sex. If she was softness wrapped in steel, then this time it was steel wrapped in softness I'd be tasting.